I actually have two MVWRs. The first was from my freshman year in college. I had told this girl, N, that I would live with her after having the same math tutor. I should have known it was going to be bad when my parents were taking us out to lunch, N was on her phone talking about getting enough bail money to get her boyfriend out of jail (I am probably the most naive, sheltered person — at least I was freshman year — ever, but I don’t know how my parents left knowing who I was living with). We got to know each other and even though we were from very different backgrounds we got along fine. Then after Christmas break, her boyfriend got out of jail. That’s when he decided to live with us, even though we were in a one room dorm and it was against the rules. I was too shy and scared of them to say anything, so he moved in. Because he had just gotten out of jail (for stabbing someone in the neck!) he didn’t sleep well and would often scream in his sleep. That was when they even slept; they often had sex with me in the room.

When he had to go back home, she would call me incessantly because she was lonely and whine about why I wasn’t there to mope with. She even gave me a curfew to come back because she didn’t have any other friends. When her boyfriend was there, they would fight constantly, calling each other horrible names and hitting each other and then have really loud sex with me in the room. I would finally get up and leave. I lasted the whole school year and moved to another dorm the next summer. But that’s not the worst of the worst.

I moved to Australia last year with a friend and I knew one person from the summer camp I worked at. When T said she had two extra rooms in her house, we gladly moved in. My friend and I both immediately got jobs and went about starting a life. T started getting jealous about us honing in on her friends, so she started wild rumors about us, never invited us to their events, even though they specifically asked her to invite us. When we did go to parties where she was, she acted horrible to us. We were there during the awful brushfires and T decided she was going to start a clothing drive. She collected clothes from everyone and said she would drive them to the area affected by the fires. After doing this she ran around the house calling herself “Angelina Jolie” and “an amazing person.” But first she went through the clothes to see if she wanted to keep any of them (which she did) and then never donated them. They sat in our kitchen for months. When my other Australian roommate L finally moved them out of the way, she called him at work at shouted at him for touching “her stuff.” She finally donated it to the Salvation Army five months later.

Her room was disgusting, she kept all her dishes in there so we never had any, she threw temper tantrums constantly and then an hour later would try and hug us and say she loved us. We were going back to the States in July, so we told her at the end of may when we were leaving. And even though she knew we were leaving early from the lease, she acted surprised and expected us to pay our rent through the end of lease even though we wouldn’t be there. She refused to find another roommate and so we had to do it. Finally, she always complained she was broke even though she got paid $500 a week and her parents paid her rent, so when the refrigerator broke a week before we were set to leave, she asked us to help pay for a new one. Wow. Our friends in America don’t believe she actually exists.

I moved in with M and K after a neutral split with a boyfriend who I was living with. They had an extra room and K’s parents owned the house that they were staying in, I liked that I could bring my pets and they had a cat and dog who would keep them company while I went to school and worked. All was going well, I’m pretty laid back so I wasn’t really bothered when the same four friends of theirs came over everyday for hours, wrecked the place and left. We would all party most of the week and on the weekends, before school resumed. I had to put up with blaring rock band and Guitar Hero till all hours of the night and morning. When it was really cold outside I would smoke a bowl out the window to relax and try to study/sleep/enjoy my life.

Then things started to get weird. K had obviously had a problem with me “stealing her spotlight” because her friends liked me more than her. I couldn’t guess why since she said some of the most horrible things about them behind their backs and to each other. She would even go as far as insulting one girl’s dead mother. She couldn’t wait for people to leave so she could gossip; I was mostly appalled, tried to nod and smile and stay out of the drama. The house was filthy, except when K barked orders at M to clean it, she would sit and drink Diet Coke with a plastic guitar in her hands and watch him. They smoked cigarettes constantly and left the porch trashed on a nightly basis, but I was the bad guy cause I smoked a bit of weed, which confused me cause they would steal my weed whenever I left it on my desk.

Every time I would come home I would find K and four of her friends glued to the TV screaming into headsets playing XBox. I would immediately have to take both the dogs out since they hadn’t been let out since I left in the morning. Also, their dog routinely pissed on the couch and their friends spread MRSA (a sometimes fatal-antibiotic resistant staph infection) around to each other like candy. The health department and I both recommended a thorough cleaning/bleaching of common areas and furniture so that the infection wouldn’t be spread further or carried to others. These recommendations fell on deaf ears and I pulled an Anne Frank and stayed holed up in my room until I found another place to live (I was a week into a brutal college semester studying environmental economics — the irony was almost worth it).

When I did move out K had a literal panic attack, claiming that I owed her more money and threatened to call the cops. I told her to go ahead since there was no lease and every agreement was purely verbal. I didn’t pay and her friend threatened to kick my ass, while a large intimidating male friend stood by and glared, but he never made a step towards me and I’m so glad to be away from that biological warfare of a living room. Happy ending: I found a gorgeous house at the same price with three roommates, two are now my BFFs and the other turned out to be the love of my life and my animals haven’t been happier with their new friends either. Score!

I was the cause of my four university flatmates Very Worst Roommate, and arguably, mine. I started university and had just turned 18, was horribly naïve and was living away from home for the first time. It had also been instilled in me by my parents that being “passive” equaled “polite” and being confrontational was just unacceptable in a woman, as this equated being a bitch.

I met my ex-boyfriend, who we’ll call Fuzzy, almost immediately. He began to hang out at my halls of residence. Twice a week. Three times. Four. Then all day, all night, all week. He stayed in my room during this time, and whilst I really, really liked him, I didn’t have the cajones to tell him that staying this frequently was unacceptable and that I needed my own space. To make matters worse, Fuzzy had poor personal hygiene. I mean, really, really poor. He was with me 24/7 so I knew that he showered, at most, once a month. He also only cleaned his teeth once a week. He got sweaty very frequently, but didn’t wash his clothes at all. Eventually, I did it myself as I couldn’t stand the smell, and his white t-shirts were yellowing.

My flatmates and I shared the cost of food between us, as we all got on well together. However, Fuzzy also ate this food, but never contributed, until about two months in when I literally had to spell it out for him to do so. I felt horrendously guilty for burdening my poor, patient flatmates with Fuzzy as I was such a walking doormat, and did, eventually, through life-experience of living on my own and realising that actually, being honest with someone doesn’t equate being a horrible person.

I had a housemate that was dating an English professor at the college in our town. He must have made quite an impression with the girls because another friend of mind used to rave about how great he was. He was from Ireland or Wales and had a charming accent, etc. When my housemate called it off, the prof couldn’t take the rejection and started getting all dramatic. He called saying that he was dying, so when she went over to his place he said, “I knew you would come back to me.” When that little ploy didn’t work, he tried showing up on our porch raving drunk in the middle of and demanding to be let in. She ignored this and began entertaining a string of gentlemen callers that I started running into in the mornings in our kitchen. The house was an old wooden one, so it was pretty clear what they were doing late into the night. I moved out as soon as I could.

I found this posting that seemed too good to be true. It was five minutes from my work, allowed pets and it was $100 under my budget. I met the guy who has posted the listing and he seemed pretty decent. He was a student and it sounded like it would be a quiet house, with not much partying going on. The first month went fine, with only minor incidents. However, as time progressed, things got really bad. As I got to know my fellow housemates, the drama just seemed to explode. One of the housemates was a girl who worked as a personal trainer, but turned out to be doing some stripping on the side. I normally wouldn’t be bothered by that, but she was so inconsiderate of everyone else that I lost any respect for her. She had a cat that she took very poor care of. I have two cats of my own and she blamed my cat for peeing all over the place, even though it was her cat. She never cleaned its litter box and it took her several weeks to take it into to vet to get care for a urinary tract infection.

I work with animals for a living and it pained me to see this. She would also be gone for four days out of the week due to her stripping job and the cat would be left in her room, without food or water. I would sneak into her room to take care of it and let it out of her hell-hole of a room. She would repeatedly clog the toilet and wouldn’t unclog it. She wouldn’t buy toilet paper, even though we had made it perfectly clear we would take turns supplying such communal items. She even wiped her ass on my hand towel, denied it and then blamed it on me because I had left it out (hanging on the towel rod). The entire time I lived there, I saw her do dishes once, even though she probably used the most dishes out of anyone.

This same girl also decided to take in another girl she “worked” with, telling us that it would only be a few weeks. This girl would hog the bathroom for hours, blasted awful music at 3am on a Tuesday and she would leave used pregnancy tests on the kitchen counter. After leaving the bathroom, the tub would be filled with brownish water and tons of floating little curly hairs. Yum yum. I left three months into a year lease. The last I heard, the girl who was only supposed to be there for a few weeks had moved into my old room with a guy she’d been dating for three weeks.

K moved into my 4-bedroom condo less than a month ago and is being evicted this month.

On Saturday, I came home at 6:30 p.m. from a friend’s house and found 20 people in my house dancing to techno music. Each was high on either GHB, coke, MDMA, ketamine, or a combination. I was asked multiple times if I “needed something” as a tray of various white substances and pills was placed in front of me. I was a bit stressed and needed to get out of there. I escaped to the park with my my dog to process what I walked in on. After an hour, I walked back home as I needed to speak with a few clients in Taiwan. When I went to my room, I found a girl passed out in my bed. I walked downstairs to the closest muscular man and politely asked him to remove the girl from my room.

On this day, one of the other housemates, M was away, and another, R, was hiding in his bedroom from the craziness. At a loss of what to do, I do my work and lock the dog and cat in my room with me. I spoke to K around 9 p.m. when he told me that everyone was leaving. At 11 p.m., he told me the same thing. At 12, R invited me to go out with him while he advertises for a club. We returned home around 4:30 a.m. The party was still going. I found K and told him he must remove everyone from the house and that I’m not comfortable with this many drugs and people (whom he just met the previous night) in the house. He told me that because he did the dishes that I should let him have his friends over. I attributed his apathetic response to him being high. Everyone left shortly thereafter to go to another party. A few days later, I explained why I was upset. He told me that his party was no different than when R and I have our three mutual friends over for cocktails as he ‘didn’t know them’. He didn’t understand why it was a bit dangerous to a woman to have 20 strangers drugged out in her home,

I found out later that that this party at my place was the after-party from their partying the previous night, They had gone straight from the after hours place to the rooftop of my condo building then into our home.

My Very Worst Roommate (we’ll call him “R”) was actually my best friend all through high school. I always thought he’d be a blast to live with. After school, he moved to the city and I stayed in town and got a killer place to myself. One night, R called me up and told me how miserable he was living in the city and how he wanted to move back to our town. So, I drove to the city, picked him up and he moved in. Now R needed a job. I told him I could get him some food and he didn’t have to worry about rent until he got a job.

It wasn’t long after he moved in that I started to see his disgusting habits–not using plates, sandwiches on the couch, dripping toothpaste in the living room without realizing it, never picking up anything, you name it! Finally, about three months in, I helped get him a job at the same store I worked at and he finally started paying rent. Things have been pretty fun so far.

However, R had a friend. A homeless friend. This kid finished high school and has couch surfed for four years. R started having this homeless kid over and letting him sleep on the couch. Night after night after night! They would trash the place every night, and every morning I would be woken up before my alarm by them doing some fantasy role playing wizard stuff. Oh yeah, this kid stunk up the whole place!

So enough is enough, right? I put my foot down and said this kid can only come over once in a while but never stay the night. Now R thought this was like rollover minutes. Homeless kid wouldn’t be there for a while, and then three days straight. R would find every loophole to have this kid over, not to mention buy him food every night. I don’t hate homeless people, but this kid could have easily got a job. He didn’t because people like R would enable him to coast through life on handouts. The problem pretty much tore apart our friendship for a while. R thought I was the bad guy. So R moved in with our other friend. Of course, the same thing happened and homeless kid is now banned from that place too. Get a job dude!

My Very Worst college Roommate was S, a spoiled brat who had all her bills paid by daddy and tortured us with her sense of entitlement, pathological need for attention, and lack of respect for others. I have not met anyone in the three decades since college who had a more self-absorbed attitude than this miserable little snot.

She was engaged to a guy she let live rent-free with us – without asking us first, of course. Although he was using water and electricity, leaving his razor stubble in our bathroom sink, and invading our privacy, she would come unglued if we did something she didn’t like, such as turn on the heat when it got cold or come in late from bar-hopping.

We had a front-row seat to their baby-talk at all hours, which was gross because even though her boyfriend slightly resembled Tom Selleck, he had a high-pitched voice like Porky Pig. It was not a good combination. He was so whipped, he would get up with her at 6 a.m. on weekends to watch Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies, which were her idea of relationship nirvana.

The worst thing was, she wouldn’t let me lock the bathroom door if I planned to take a shower because her bladder was small and she might have to use the toilet. Once I was taking a bath and the beeyotch came in and took a quick picture of me—mascara streaming down my face, looking like a drowned rat. She showed it off at her next family get-together, although she lied and said she didn’t.

The whole world revolved around her—when her hometown church burned down, she screamed bloody murder because now she couldn’t get married there as planned. After months of her BS, my other roommate moved out in disgust. I suffered on, but was ecstatic when the idiot Princess moved out the next term. She complained to daddy about my “bad attitude,” and he paid for her to live in a co$tly condo.

I live in a three bedroom townhouse and need two roommates in order to make my rent. My boyfriend was moving in and I got a new roommate who arrived about a week after he did. When my female roommate and I first met (through Craigslist) she had said her boyfriend would be home from his job on a cruise ship, but would only for three weeks as had to go back onto the ship. I told her it was fine that he stay with us. The four of us got along really well and she was gone a lot hanging out with her friends. On weeknights my boyfriend and I always went to bed early because we had to work in the morning.

One night, around 2am my roommate came barging into our room, flipped on the light and exclaimed that she had lost her phone. All I could do was stare at her. She said that she lost her phone several times and finally I replied with, “What do you want me to do about it?” She explained further that she used it to wake up in the morning and asked if I had something for her to use. I told her she could use my cell phone which was right on my bedside table. Even though she was standing right there she said she didn’t know where it was. I gave it to her and she left. A few minutes later she came back in saying she needed me to set it for her so I did. What made this situation so awkward was that I was naked, trying to stay completely under the covers while I set my cell phone alarm clock for her.

A week went by and my boyfriend and I didn’t see her so we figured she was embarrassed because she was obviously drunk or on something when she did that. When I finally got to ask her about it, she claimed she had only two beers that night. About a month later my boyfriend and I broke up and her boyfriend got back from the cruise ship. My ex paid that month in rent so I wouldn’t be screwed over money wise. Meanwhile, I looked for a third roommate assuming my roommate’s boyfriend would be leaving. I guess he lost his job on the ship because he never left. I wasn’t able to find another roommate so I asked if he could pay the third share of rent. My roommate got pissed at me and said that since they shared a room, he shouldn’t have to pay rent.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend would cook these elaborate meals and leave the clean up for me, all without offering me any of the food. I found out my roommate was horribly jealous and would get mad at him anytime he stayed in the same room as me, like the living room or kitchen. I dealt with him living there for four months before they finally moved out. I finally told her that I was sick of him living there and not picking up after himself. She called me a coward for not telling her sooner. She wanted her deposit back a month before she moved out and I told her no. She then called me a miserable person.

My freshman year roomate was an ultra-religious Korean guy named Paul. At first we got along by ignoring each other, but as I spent more time in my dorm room doing work, I was exposed to more of his peculiar tendencies. He only listened to two types of music: Christian rock, which sounded like Third Eye Blind only all the lyrics were about Jesus and hard-core Korean rap, which sounded exactly like American rap, except everything’s in Korean besides the occasional “motherfucker.”  He would watch one of the Rush Hour movies over and over again, but not the whole movie. Just the same 4-minute sequence where Chris Tucker almost falls off a building. Over and over again. Every night.

Then things got weirder. I would come back to my room when the weather was still warm, to find him in nothing but boxers and the thermostat cranked up past 80 degrees. He sang along to his music in a high falsetto. He’d leave his laptop open with pictures of him and other Korean guys hugging, wearing very little clothes. But at the same time, he always had his Bible on his desk, and updated his AIM profile to declare that he “hated fags.” As someone with several gay relatives, I’m fine with homosexuality, but people who have their true nature suppressed and distorted by religion are all but insane. I avoided my dorm as much as I could, but one night, everything collided into a mess.

I came back to my dorm room in a hurry at around 9 PM on a Thursday and finding the door unlocked, walked right inside. Paul was in the sink area, wearing nothing but boxers as usual. As I walked in, I looked ahead and saw a completely naked guy sitting on his bed, feet propped up like he was resting. A moment of utterly awkward silence. I quickly grabbed shoved my stuff into my backpack, as the other guy hopped up and struggled into his pants. As I made a hasty exit, I could hear the other kid say, “So Paul… need uh, any more help with your, uh, Comp Sci?” Comp Sci my ass.